GOP fighting another losing battle
“This Iranian nuclear deal is catastrophic. It is the single greatest security threat facing America. And if this deal goes through, we know to an absolute certainty – PEOPLE WILL DIE”
Ted Cruz at a Capitol Hill rally against the Iran Nuclear deal on Sept. 9th.
We’re All Gonna Die
Fighting lost causes is the only thing Republicans know how to do these days.
There’ve been nearly 60 Republican-backed votes to end Obamacare.
Each of those votes failed.
Even before those votes, Republicans knew they were wasting their time, because if any of those bills had passed, President Obama would have dealt them a swift veto.
Futility doesn’t count. Fighting a lost cause does, I guess.
Last week, a day after Democrats secured enough votes to block any Republican efforts to call a halt to the Iran nuclear deal, mouthy Republicans stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, rallying against it.
Presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, were joined by failed vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, in predicting that the entire United States of America will become a nuclear contaminated parking lot if the deal goes through. Trump, for his part, just claimed that the deal’s negotiators are “very, very stupid people.”
“Americans will die, Israelis will die, Europeans will die,” said Cruz, the congressional fortuneteller.
He believes that Iran would send a nuke into the air, and that could lead to a turn of events that would “kill tens of millions of Americans.”
Cruz had a busy week.
The day before that rally, he joined his fellow presidential candidate Mike Huckabee at the Carter County Detention Center in Grayson, Ky.
They’d gone to show their support for the jailed county clerk, Kim Davis, who’d thumbed her nose at court orders that mandated her to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, despite her stated religious beliefs.
Huckabee, who is already fighting a lost cause because he stands no chance of winning the presidency, told a rally in support of Davis, “Lock me up if you think that’s how freedom is best served, because folks, I am willing to spend the next eight years in the White House leading this country but I want you to know, I’m willing to spend the next eight years in jail.”
He won’t end up in jail, but more importantly, he won’t spend a single night in the White House, either.
Huckabee’s effort to use Kim Davis as a campaign prop, is alarmingly transparent.
Especially since Huckabee’s defense of Davis is so weak.
The following morning, Huckabee appeared on MSNBC, and he claimed Davis had been “persecuted for her faith.”
In fact, she was jailed for contempt of court. She’d simply refused to perform the duties she’d been elected to perform.
The judge who ordered Davis to jail never said she couldn’t express her faith.
But Huckabee’s argument fell completely apart, when he tried to say that the federal government can’t impose itself in matters involving marriage.
“Let me know which article of the constitution that says that same-sex marriage is under the jurisdiction of the federal government,” he asks.
Well, Huckabee is being intentionally obtuse, because there’s not even an article of the constitution that deals with marriage – period.
But there has been a wealth of case law that has dealt with the matter.
Loving v. Virginia is that famous U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down bans against interracial marriage back in June of 1967.
That ruling affirmed the rights of a black woman and a white man to be considered a married couple, despite what the laws of had Virginia (the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924”) said.
That case was used in deciding for same-sex marriage, or against bans of it, in four circuit courts of appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in their favor this year.
And part of the Supreme Court’s ruling that allows for same-sex marriage to be legal across the country, Loving v. Virginia was cited a dozen times.
Huckabee is fighting a lost cause.
You know what that makes him, don’t you?
A Republican.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net